Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense Read online

  “Time for you to take your son home, Mr. Heike. You people have wasted enough of our time”—the State Police officer spoke disgustedly.

  We could not believe this! I could not believe it.

  “That woman wasn’t killed with any knife, son. You made that bullshit all up. She was killed in a different way, that is not yet released to the public. But nobody stabbed her. There was no knife. And nobody stole anything from her. You can all go home now”—with contempt the State Police officer spoke.

  These words were so shocking to me, I could scarcely get to my feet. Since being brought to the police station that night I had not eaten regular meals but things from the vending machines. Ma had not been well enough to prepare any food for me, for Pa to bring. So my legs were weak, I could not walk without swaying.

  Looks of such disgust in the officers’ faces, even in the face of Pa’s detective friend. And pity.

  Trying to explain to those faces: “It wasn’t a knife. I didn’t mean to say a knife. It was my fists and my feet—my boots. I beat her to death. Beat and kicked her. That was all I needed—my fists, my boots. Couldn’t stop beating her until …”

  “Get him the hell out of here. Get him out.”

  “Then I hid her in the wall—inside the wall. Where nobody was supposed to find her …”

  Laid their hands on me and walked me out of the room half-dragging me and my father fuming and cursing in disgust of me and behind me their voices rising in incredulity and fury.

  Get that crazy cocksucker out of here just get him OUT.

  3.

  Ma would say, He could not help himself. Something came over him, to confess to something he had not done. God will forgive him. We pray and pray to understand. But Ma did not ever want to see me again in any way in which the two of us were alone together and even then, Ma could not bring herself to look at me.

  Pa would not speak of it at all. Pa was shamed and knew himself derided by his closest relatives and friends. He would not work at Heike Lumber ever again on a full-time basis. He would walk out of the yard if something pissed him. He would drink himself to death a can of Molson’s at a time he’d say laughing, Fuck, he was in no hurry.

  Forever it would be known in Bordentown that I had confessed to killing Mrs. S___ who’d lived on Cottage Street, a former elementary school and Sunday school teacher. A widow who’d lived alone in a house filling up with trash with no children and no relatives to look in on her, to see how she was.

  As a younger woman she’d been some kind of glamor-girl. People spoke pityingly of her, recalling. Putting on airs. Pathetic.

  She’d been Howard Heike’s Sunday school teacher years before. Children had complained of her, she’d scared them with her stories and made fun of them though afterward claiming it was because she’d liked them so much, and wanted them to like her.

  Maybe that was why Howard Heike had killed her?—people speculated.

  Or, no. Howard Heike had not killed her. He had only confessed that he had.

  Years would pass. The house on Cottage Street would be sold, and then razed. Dump trucks of debris hauled away. Howard Heike would drop out of school, leave Bordentown in disgrace and return and still how exactly Mrs. S___ had died was not known. The coroner had not established an absolute cause of death. It was possible (though not absolutely provable) that there had been foul play. The bruised, battered and emaciated body weighing only seventy-three pounds when discovered crammed into the storage space had been partially decomposed, the face had seemed to cave in upon itself as if beaten with something blunt and hard though not (evidently) a fist. (A brick, wrapped in a towel?) (Pounded against a wall by the woman herself, a towel over the face?) The chest and rib cage showed signs of breakage and trauma (as if kicked by a booted foot) though possibly the injuries were self-inflicted as the malnutrition would seem to have been self-inflicted and the hair on the head stiff and matted with grease, unwashed for weeks, a haven for lice.

  Enlisted in the U.S. military. For I had no police record, I had not been arrested but only taken into custody and then released when my confession was rejected.

  If I am not the murderer of Mrs. S_____, then the murderer of Mrs. S___ was never discovered. Now that I am discharged (honorable!) from the army and returned to Bordentown I am sure that I will see him, or he will see me, in a bar, on the street, at the 7-Eleven. Laying awake nights excited to wonder what the look will be that will pass between us. Which of us will make the first move—“Hey. You. Do I know you?”

  The Experimental Subject

  1.

  She was a solid-bodied female of perhaps twenty years of age with a plain face, an unusually low, simian brow, small squinting eyes, tentative manner like that of a creature that is being herded blindly along a chute. In a bulky nylon jacket, unzipped. Rust-color frizzed hair. Approximately five feet three, weight one hundred forty pounds. Full bosom of an older woman, thick muscled thighs and legs, thick ankles, large splayed feet and a center of gravity in the pelvic region.

  Entering the lecture hall, alone. Blinking nervously as she glanced about for an empty seat. Or for someone to smile, wave at her and invite her to sit with them …

  But no one. Not likely. And so, taking her seat in the fifth row, settling her bulky backpack at her feet.

  There it is—she is. Our subject. Like an electric current these words ran through the technician’s brain as (covertly) he took several quick pictures of the girl with his iPhone.

  It was a season of protracted heat, drought. No precipitation for months and since early September a hot, arid wind like a persistent cough.

  Behind the green-tinted glass columns of Rockefeller Life Sciences Hall the temperature was fixed at 66 degrees Fahrenheit. From vents in the twelve-foot walls humidified air moved like invisible caresses.

  The first to sight the girl—the (potential) experimental subject—was the senior technician in the Professor’s (restricted, government-funded) primate laboratory. Liking to think of himself as a scout—a peregrine falcon—in the service of the Professor, anticipating solutions to problems which the Professor had not (yet) considered.

  For the distinguished Professor was so intensely absorbed in his work he seemed often not to know whether an experiment was nearing completion, was only midway, or had just begun, considering the most complicated experiment but a sequence of steps like bricks in a walkway to bring others to the destination at which the Professor already waited like a Buddha basking in his own enlightenment.

  Of course! An experiment is not a blundering to discovery but a confirmation of what is already known.

  The search for the new experimental subject had not officially begun. But the senior technician N____—(name unpronounceable—Chinese? Korean? Vietnamese?—too many consonants crowded into a single syllable for the non-Asian ear to grasp)—had been keeping his falcon-eyes open.

  Alone of his colleagues N___ was in the habit of wandering in the lower University campus where he wasn’t likely to encounter anyone he knew, or who knew him. A tall (six feet, two inches) dark-clad knife-blade of a man, lithe as a shadow flying across a walkway, exquisite in aloneness as a figure in an ancient Asian woodcut. Though visible to anyone who actually looked at him yet N___ had the advantage of invisibility that is the particular prerogative of his species: deceptively bland Asian face, wire-rimmed eyeglasses, short-cropped very black glossy hair, dark flannel sweatshirt or hoodie, running shoes.

  His age?—could be mid-twenties. No one could have guessed late thirties.

  Even in the primate laboratory N___ did not always appear visible. Standing only a few feet from the Professor he’d heard the Professor inquire irritably, “Where is N___ when I need him?”

  At which point N___ did not smile (visibly), cleared his throat and said in his most courteous nongloating voice: “Professor, I am here.”

  He’d sighted her, unmistakably. He was certain.

  After the lecture lingering at the front of the amphitheater.
As undergraduates streamed past waiting for the low-browed girl that he might (unobtrusively) follow her.

  Having grasped instinctively that the girl was of that subcategory of young female who was not likely to have friends; certainly, not male friends. She will be grateful for attention. She will not ask why. She will not suspect a motive.

  The subject of the Professor’s lecture that day had been the phenomenon called mitosis. Stages of cell mitosis, stages of cell cycle, meiosis. All of life is involved in the replication of life: that is the meaning contained in the word life.

  No one understood the why of such a process. But they were beginning to understand how. And very exciting it was to them, the Professor’s handpicked team, the process of how which they were learning to replicate.

  At the lectures it was N____’s custom to sit at the very end of the first row of seats in the semidarkened amphitheater, that he might observe the faint glimmer of hundreds of computer screens cast upward on young, earnest faces. The Professor’s carefully chosen words, uttered through a microphone, further amplified by the PowerPoint presentation (which N___ had helped prepare for the Professor) were channeled through the neurons of the young, fingers rapidly typing on laptop keyboards as in a mass hypnosis.

  And then, after fifty intense minutes, the spell was broken. The lecture was ended. Lights came up in the amphitheater, the Professor exited the stage. Laptops were shut, backpacks gathered. Where there’d been respectful silence, relieved chatter began.

  Biding his time until the low-browed girl passed in the aisle descending steps with an awkward sort of care and gripping her bulky backpack to her chest. Of course, oblivious of N_____.

  Exiting the amphitheater, following the girl outside. Like a practiced predator taking care to keep others between them and following at a distance of about thirty feet.

  It was not difficult to keep the low-browed girl in sight: frizzed rust-colored hair that looked as if she’d brushed it with rough, random strokes of a brush, stolid mammalian figure, slightly rounded shoulders, a way of pushing herself forward that was both “perky” and defeated. The girl wore an unflattering University jacket of some grape-colored nylon fabric, which she kept unzipped and open, for she was overweight and inclined to be warm on even a chilly autumn morning; perhaps bizarrely, in a gesture that should have been embarrassing to her, the low-browed girl hoped to draw attention to her sizable breasts as if not grasping (of course, the ideal experimental subject was not intelligent enough to grasp) that she was at least thirty pounds beyond the undergraduate ideal for a twenty-year-old female, even if her earnest simian face had been attractive. On her sturdy thighs and legs were jeans that looked stiff and new, also unattractive.

  How different this female specimen was from most of the undergraduate girls at the University! If they adhered to a type, regardless of race or ethnicity they were likely to be slender, with long straight silky hair, flawless skin. They were not hesitant but confident. They did not exude aloneness even when they were walking alone.

  It was something of a mystery, N___ thought. That the girl with the low forehead, quizzical eyes and diffident manner had dared to enroll in the introductory biology course, competing with premed students, biochemistry majors, neuroscientists …

  N___ felt a pang of pity for the experimental subject. But by definition, no specimen who so matched the requirements for the experimental subject could be anything other than pitiable.

  How slowly the girl walked! No more than half N____’s normal speed. If he weren’t vigilant, he’d have easily caught up with her.

  Following the girl across campus and into the student union, a featureless cube offensive to an eye attuned to the elegantly minimal architecture of Life Sciences. Relieved at least that the girl hadn’t returned to her residence hall where N___ couldn’t have followed her. Hoping she wasn’t meeting a friend for lunch which would ruin his plans.

  But the experimental subject would not have a friend, ideally …

  Having to wait, at a little distance, as the girl entered a women’s restroom.

  This, N___ resented. There came into his pristine mind an unpleasant vision of the restroom interior: crumpled paper napkins (and worse) in a trash bin, hairs in sinks, a smell of toilets and drains, the plain, pasty-faced low-browed girl peering at herself anxiously in a communal mirror, primping her hair, puckering her fleshy lips … Admired in the Professor’s lab for his fastidious care in prepping experimental animals for the insertion of electrodes into their brains, as for making sure that his tech assistants kept the animals’ cages as clean as possible, N___ felt a rush of repugnance, indignation. If there’d been the faintest glimmer of romance in the prospect of befriending/seducing the experimental subject, minuscule as bacteria flourishing in a petri dish, this vision would have killed it.

  In the lab, among his colleagues who were both appreciative of the technician’s help when they required it and resentful of his close (if scarcely verbal) relationship with the Professor, it was speculated that N___ was, whatever age he was, not so much “virginal” as “asexual.” No one had ever seen N___ with a woman in what might have been romantic circumstances, nor indeed with a man.

  N___ had a vague sense of this reputation. So long as the Professor held him in high regard, he did not so much mind what others said of him though it amused him to think that anyone should consider him a virgin.

  “Asexual”—yes. Probably.

  The cafeteria was only just beginning to fill. Casually N___ fell into line behind the low-browed girl who appeared hungry for lunch, at five minutes before noon. A good appetite! A healthy female specimen made for breeding, wide-hipped and with a (probable) high threshold for pain.

  N___ was taller than the girl by a head. This was good—(was it?); authority exudes from superior height in Homo sapiens as in other mammalian species. Moving a sticky black plastic tray behind hers, seemingly by accident giving her tray a nudge.

  “Hi, h’lo—thought I saw you in Intro Biology, was that you?”

  Exactly what a fellow student might say in these circumstances. Composing the bland-inscrutable Asian face into a friendly smile and hoping the girl would not perceive immediately how forced and insincere these banal words were.

  Startled, the girl looked up at N_____. Stammering, blushing—“Yah … yes. Intro Biology, I just came from the lecture …”

  Surprised that N___ was speaking to her. Touchingly grateful for the friendly smile from the tall neatly dressed handsome (?) young Asian man.

  “… like, my head aches from trying to make sense of … what’s it … miyotis …”

  “‘Mitosis.’”

  “‘Mi-to-sis.’ Yah.”

  Looming tall, not too close to the low-browed girl, friendly but polite. Gentlemanly. Pushing his tray behind her tray as if they were casual acquaintances and not total strangers.

  It was the girl’s wish to present herself to this unexpected fellow student as overwhelmed by the biology lecture. Imagining that, to N_____, seeming even less intelligent than she probably was would appeal to him as male.

  But it was a way for N___ to connect with the girl, a stratagem to deflect her suspicion. Falling in with her tone of wry puzzlement N___ volunteered cheerfully that, of the Professor’s lecture that morning, he’d understood just a fraction himself—“Eleven percent.”

  A joke: eleven percent. To glance at N___ would be to guess that N___ was hardly of that cohort who have difficulty understanding an undergraduate science lecture; a more experienced individual than the low-browed girl would have guessed postdoc, research science, Chinese?—Korean?—Vietnamese?—quirky but brilliant.

  Unsuspecting any stratagem on N____’s part the (naive) girl imagined N___ as a kindred undergraduate though surely—for so N___ perceived the girl’s brain cranking into action like a computer of another era—smarter than she was. Just possibly, potential help to her in preparing for exams. Tutorials. Study dates. Nodding fiercely in agreement, “Oh, gosh, I k
now! The same with me. He’s, like, a famous professor, a scientist—they say … I try so hard to understand him but it slips through my brain, I guess. Sometimes I try so hard it hurts.”

  As if the girl meant to be funny N___ laughed. Not very convincingly but in her excitement the girl took no notice. Like an actor reading a script he has never seen before N___ said that he felt the same way—“Except it’s my back molars that hurt, from grinding.”

  Wincingly unfunny but the girl laughed as if she’d been tickled. Her mouth was large as a pike’s mouth, her hilarity breathless and overdone.

  “You mean, like—at night … Yah, sometimes I grind my teeth too, it used to be worse when I was a little kid …”

  Smiling at N___ coquettishly now. Oh, this was flirting!

  N___ had not been in such intimate quarters with a female for some time. The Professor did not encourage females in his primate lab—even gifted female postdocs had been turned away, and female research scientists in Life Sciences were pursuing their own subjects. N___ had little contact with undergraduate girls enrolled in the lecture course for he was not one of the Professor’s team of teaching assistants; he’d more or less forgotten the (hypothetical) sexual imperative that a male naturally seeks a female mate, to reproduce his own kind. N___ did not care much for his own kind—his DNA. Yet he felt the pathos of this so clearly lonely and love-starved girl who not even smiling could make pretty. He would have to harden his heart against her, not to succumb to pity.

  Of all human emotions, pity is the least useful.

  For the scientist whose research involves experimental animals, pity is particularly not-useful.

  Asking the girl if she was having lunch with anyone and when she shook her head no asking if he could sit with her and she laughed in sheer confused delight (it seemed) as blood rushed alarmingly into her face. Eagerly she said, “Yah—yes.”

  “Well. Maybe we could sit together …”

  “Oh—yes.”

  Deftly N___ guided them into a corner of the cafeteria, where no one was likely to intrude.